Press Contact: Travis McDonald, Director of Architectural Restoration, Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest, P.O. Box 419, Forest, VA 24551-0419, Phone: (434) 534-8123, Fax: (334) 525-7252, Email: travis@poplarforest.org

SESAH ANNOUNCES 2006 AWARD WINNERS & EXPANDS TO INCLUDE TEXAS

Inaugural “Best of the South: Preserving Southern Architecture Award” Goes to The Coastal Heritage Society in Savannah, Georgia

Annual Publication Awards go to Authors in Virginia, Mississippi, Ohio, & Washington, DC – Special Award to Preservationist in Mississippi

SESAH Expands to include Texas in New 12-State Territory

Forest, VA – October 6, 2006. The Board of Directors of the Southeastern Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH) announced the 2006 SESAH Award Winners at the 24th Annual SESAH Annual Meeting. Auburn University’s College of Architecture, Design, & Construction hosted the three-day conference, held September 27-30 in Auburn, Alabama. “SESAH continues to grow in many ways and this year’s meeting was marked by very strong attendance with nearly 100 participants from around the southeast, the nation, and even internationally,” stated SESAH president David Gobel of the Savannah College of Art & Design in Georgia. “The society’s Auburn meeting will be remembered not only for bringing in Texas, but for its inaugural ‘Best of the South’ award for preservation and for its generally delightful and exceptionally well-organized program of events.”

“The 2006 SESAH Awards reflect the diversity of scholarly and innovative preservation work being undertaken by scholars and preservationists throughout the South as well as from those outside the region,” stated Travis McDonald, spokesperson for the SESAH awards committees and the Director of Architectural Restoration at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest in Forest, Virginia. “From Midwestern grain palaces and New South industrial architecture to the rehabilitation of a 1855 railroad roundhouse and academic studies of architects Benjamin Latrobe and Frank Milburn, this year’s award winners cover a wide range of architectural types and subject matter.”

The 2006 Best Essay Award was presented to Pamela H. Simpson for her chapter “Cereal Architecture: Late-Nineteenth-Century Grain Palaces and Crop Art,” published in the book Building Environments: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture X, edited by Kenneth A. Breisch and Alison K. Hoagland

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(Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 269-282. “In this essay Simpson investigates the practice of making brightly colored ‘mosaics’ of natural seeds and grain that clad county fair buildings in the mid-west in the late 19th century,” stated Philippe Oszusick of the University of South Alabama and chair of the Publications Award Committee. “These ‘grain palaces’ inspired other communities to create their own versions of ‘cereal architecture.’” Simpson teaches Art and Architectural History at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.

The 2006 Best Article Award was presented to Daniel J. Vivian for “A Practical Architect: Frank P. Milburn and the Transformation of Architectural Practice in the New South, 1890-1925,” published in Winterthur Portofolio, Vol. 40, No. 1, (Spring 2005), 17-45. “Vivian brings to light an architect working from the late 1880s to 1926 who was very popular in his time with at least 250 buildings to his credit in the Southeast,” stated Oszusick. “Yet much of his career remains in mystery with little knowledge of his work. This article examines Milburn’s career in relation to the changes that reshaped architecture and architectural practice in the post-Reconstruction South and the reasons why he was quickly forgotten following his death in 1926.” Vivian is an historian with the National Park Service in Washington, D.C. and a graduate student in history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

The 2006 Best Book Award was presented to Michael W. Fazio and Patrick A. Snadon for The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.) This major work analyzes all the domestic works of Latrobe, both in England and in America, “offering an authoritative treatment of the concepts, designs, and unique interior and exterior features of his houses.” “The authors analyze Latrobe as both an international architect and as someone who developed a ‘rational house’ for American society and culture,” stated Oszusick. “The well-researched book is beautifully illustrated with photographs, drawings, maps, and computer generated perspective drawings of unexecuted or lost works. This is a major contribution to the previous body of work on Latrobe.” Fazio is an architecture professor at Mississippi State University. Snadon is a professor of interior design at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio.

This year, SESAH created a new award called “Best of the South: Preserving Southern Architecture.” This award honors a project that preserves or restores an historic building or complex of buildings in an outstanding manner and that demonstrates excellence in research, technique, and documentation. SESAH’s inaugural 2006 Best of the South: Preserving Southern Architecture Award goes to The Coastal Heritage Society of Savannah, Georgia, for their preservation, restoration and adaptive use of the Roundhouse Railroad Museum Complex. The Central of Georgia’s railway complex is one of the oldest of its type in the country, dating to 1855. “The Coastal Heritage Society has done an outstanding job over many years in bringing this important industrial complex back into use,” stated Travis McDonald, chair of the Best of the South Awards Committee. “The recent work for which the award was given includes the rehabilitation work on the 1855 Tender Frame Shop; the restoration of the early twentieth-century workers’ garden and the 1923 locomotive turntable; the adaptive use of a 1920s African-American workers washroom; and the conservation of the 1920s addition to the 1855 Roundhouse. A preservation team of researchers and craftsmen have used sound documentary research, archaeology, architectural investigation, paint research, masonry and metal replication, timber conservation, and sensitive retrofitting of modern systems to preserve, restore, reuse, and interpret this important complex of buildings and structures.” Jury members called it “an excellent long-term project design” with “exemplary execution of craftsmanship.” Traci Bakit, Preservation Planner, and Jeanne Fullam, Project Superintendent, accepted the award on behalf of the Coastal Heritage Society.

One of the 2006 Best of the South Honorable Mention Awards went to Hanbury Evans Wright Vlattas Architects headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia, and the Community Arts Center Foundation of South Boston, Virginia, for the renovation and adaptive use of The Prizery, an early twentieth century tobacco warehouse that was converted into a community arts center, theater, art gallery, welcome center, and teaching center in South Boston, Virginia.

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The second 2006 Best of the South Honorable Mention Award went to Kann & Associates, an architectural firm in Baltimore, for the restoration of the Lovely Lane United Methodist Church in Baltimore, Maryland. This “exemplary restoration project” included the conservation and restoration of the ceiling mural in this 1885 Romanesque Style Church, designed by renowned architect Stanford White.

SESAH also announced a special award for “Professional Commitment” given to Jennifer Baughn, an architectural historian with the Mississippi State Historic Preservation Office in Jackson, Mississippi, for her unflagging efforts in the aftermath of last year’s Hurricane Katrina. Baughn organized and led teams of staff and volunteers in the enormous task of inventorying, assessing, and preserving the damaged historic buildings on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

The 2006 SESAH Publications Award Committee consisted of Philippe Oszusick of the University of South Alabama, Chair; Catherine Zipf of Regina Salve University in Rhode Island; and Travis McDonald of Jefferson’s Poplar Forest in Virginia. The 2006 Best of the South: Preserving Southern Architecture Award Committee consisted of Travis McDonald, Chair; Andrew Chandler of the South Carolina Department of Archives & History; Julia King of Fredericksburg, Virginia; and Jennifer Baughn of the Mississippi State Historic Preservation Office.

Future SESAH conferences will be held in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 24-27, 2007, and Greensboro, North Carolina, in October 2008. Visit www.sesah.org for more information.

ABOUT SESAH

The Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH) is a regional chapter of the national Society of Architectural Historians and includes twelve states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia). The nonprofit organization holds an annual meeting, publishes a quarterly newsletter and an annual journal, ARRIS, and presents annual awards. SESAH was founded in 1982 at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta to promote scholarship on architecture and related subjects and to serve as a forum for ideas among architectural historians, architects, preservationists, and others involved in professions related to the built environment. The annual meeting features scholarly paper sessions, business meeting, study tours, and a keynote lecture by a national leader in the field. SESAH members come from across the U.S. and Europe.

 www.sesah.org